The rural Kent village of Iwade may be setting a trend for rural areas by
organising its own broadband, using a grant from the county council to
unlock investment from BT

Britain will have the best broadband network in Europe by 2015, the Government has said. But for now, however, there are millions of web users, mainly in rural areas, for whom the economic and social benefits of high-speed internet are a distant dream. Not for Cornwall or Northern Ireland the widespread use of BBC iPlayer or the coming new generation of online shopping. In those two areas alone, £100 million and £48 million of public money respectively is being spent to connect them to the fast lane of the information superhighway.

In the village of Iwade in Kent, however, locals have been able to take a slightly different approach. As Steve Robertson, chief executive of infrastructure provider BT Openreach, puts it, they “got off their backsides” and sorted out their own funding. Securing a £13,000 county council grant, the local parish council has made sure that by autumn every one of the community’s nearly 1,400 houses will have access to fibre-based broadband at speeds of up to 40mb, rather than struggling along at their current 2mb or less.

The solution is not perfect, of course: not every similarly sized community can get public money. But what’s innovative about Iwade is that, for the first time in the UK, BT investment has been supplemented to make an otherwise impossible investment in fibre broadband viable. It could be the route by which huge swathes of the remaining “final third” of the population get connected to high-speed internet.

Iwade was lucky, at least, that neighbouring exchange Sittingbourne was part of BT’s already announced commitment to connect two-thirds of Britain to decent broadband. “It takes advantage of the fact that we are investing anyway,” says Robertson.

By providing nearly £13,000, Iwade was able to unlock a further £62,000 from BT, which meant it was possible to connect the village’s four telephone cabinets (which in turn link to every house) to the new fibre-optic network.

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“Up to now,” says Robertson, “broadband has always been about huge amounts of public money, but in the process of that we risk forgetting the small communities and we risk missing the chance to fill in places on the map that aren’t viable for us to do on their own.”

In fact, Iwade’s Nicola McKenzie had been looking for a way to improve the village’s broadband since 2006. Running the village’s website, she’d done a survey to assess options for people who wanted decent speeds. “Just because you’re not in a city doesn’t mean you don’t want a decent connection,” she says. “And, with more families moving in, and many of those with more than one person wanting to be online, we realised there was a real demand for better broadband.”

Former MP Derek Wyatt and a local county councillor organised a meeting with BT and, after a public meeting, a 10-person committee was formed. “We were lucky that we had real expertise among that group,” says McKenzie. That meant they could apply for a grant of up to £50,000 from a fund that Kent County Council had for community projects, and then get a contract put out to tender.

Initially, however, no options came in within budget, although satellite-based wireless broadband was a plausible option. “It was only when BT announced that they were upgrading Sittingbourne anyway,” says McKenzie, “that it became possible to push for a network where there’d be competition for customers, because any broadband provider can use BT infrastructure, which they would maintain for the future.”

The Kent County Council grant that made the project possible, however, is just one of a programme that’s been running since the largely rural county was first provided with broadband. “We’ve been looking at where we can fix the 'not-spots’ that lack coverage,” says Cllr Roger Gough. “This is the first time we’ve been able to use fibre. We can act as a catalyst in areas where the market has failed and will go on failing.”

Few councils have a scheme such as Kent’s, however, and BT’s Robertson is honest about the prospects for an expanded roll-out of broadband. “We haven’t announced a lot of where the two-thirds of the UK that we’ll be covering actually is yet,” he says. “And a lot of that will then be susceptible to incremental increases with additional, alternative sources of funding. But because we’re an ex-state monopoly, people look at us and think this is our job to go and install broadband where it simply is not economically viable. It’s not. We’re a private company.”

So while some communities will be able to apply for grants, others will continue to be “off-grid” for years to come. “It’s going to depend on our ability to minimise the cost of deployment,” says Robertson. “If we see more people signing up, that may change the economics. But there’ll still be a gap. The fastest way to find out how big that gap is is to get on and build the network.”

In straitened economic times, however, Cllr Gough admits that there are “lively discussions” about keeping the grant funds for broadband, although he adds that he hopes they will survive because of the economic and social benefits to sometimes deprived communities. Economic constraints do not sit well with BT’s analysis, however: “I feel the 66 per cent roll-out will be a minimum,” says Robertson. “And I would fully expect us to go beyond that. But it’s dependent on alternative sources of funding. The vast majority is likely to be public.”